Whose fault is persuasion?

Food for thought: When a speaker convinces an audience to do something bad, who is at fault?

In U.S. courts, the subject often receives a lot of debate. A few years ago, a woman was sentenced to jail for telling her boyfriend to kill himself, even though she had no physical part in his death. And most recently, the Jan. 6 committee has been investigating whether former President Trump is at fault for encouraging an attack on the Capitol. So again: When a speaker convinces an audience to do something bad, who is at fault?

The argument dates back to ancient Greece and the story of Helen of Troy. The infamous and beautiful woman is often blamed for the Trojan War, a decade-long battle that killed thousands of Greeks. The story goes that Helen ran away from her husband King Menelaus of Sparta to be with the Prince of Troy, Paris, after he seduced her. TL;DR, Menelaus goes crazy and launches all of Greece in Troy’s general direction. Chaos ensues.

However, there’s a lot of debate about whether or not Helen is actually responsible for the war. Some argue that she shouldn’t have ran away, but others argue that she was overtaken by Paris’s power of speech in seduction. That’s the take Gorgias, a Sophist philosopher, orator, and rhetorician, argues in his infamous Enconium of Helen:

It is the duty of one and the same man both to speak the needful rightly and to refute those who rebuke Helen, a woman about whom the testimony of inspired poets has become univocal and unanimous as had the ill omen of her name, which has become a reminder of misfortunes. For my part, by introducing some reasoning into my speech, I wish to free the accused of blame and, having reproved her detractors as prevaricators and proved the truth, to free her from their ignorance.

Gorgias basically argued that Paris’s rhetoric was too powerful and the Helen was bound by fate, love, and the gods to succumb to it. Going back to our original question, it could be argued that Gorgias is claiming that the speaker is the one who is at fault for the actions of those they persuade.

I can’t personally claim to fully agree or disagree with Gorgias’s claim, as his explanation is a little confusing (and possibly a little sexist), but I think the story is worth pondering.

After all, any question we’ve been debating for thousands of years must be full of nuance — why would this one be any different?

Quote citation: Bizzell, Patricia. “Gorgias .” Edited by George A. Kennedy. The Rhetorical Tradition: Readings from Classical Times to the Present, Bedford/St. Martin’s, Boston, 2020.